As hostilities in Gaza cooled off last month, campuses across Canada were actually heating up in preparation for "Israel Apartheid Week."

On a dour Sunday afternoon at Toronto's Ryerson University, left-leaning teachers and students hosted a conference called "Gaza: War? Occupation? Apartheid?"

The sparsely attended gathering held on Feb. 1 was low-key and not too fraught. The only tense moment was when a student awkwardly presented himself at the registration table, disdain flickering in his eyes. He did not take issue with a cartoon that portrayed a Gazan toddler with a teddy bear about to be blown to bits by an Israeli missile -- an image that would later that month be banned from other campuses. Instead, he identified himself as a South African Jew and told the pro-Palestinians that he thought the apartheid comparison to Israel was inaccurate.

The two sides exchanged lukewarm arguments; they saw no future in further discussion, and the Jewish

As anyone familiar with a bachelor's degree from the past 40 years can attest, Israel's behaviour has been an inexhaustible hobby horse for activists. But the combined freight of the Gaza conflict and the emergence of Israel Apartheid Week has put unusual strain on free speech on campuses in the past month.

"It's easier to make noise about something where no one has to come up with any solutions," said Jeff Rybak, author of What's Wrong with University. "You can just be angry."

While Mr. Rybak said Canadian students are nowhere near as militant as the Greeks, for example, he frets over the opportunity costs of such distant, insoluble fixations. "It frustrates me when time is spent on this issue that can't be solved, when they could be addressing issues where they have real power."

An event that began four years ago in Toronto, IAW, as it is also called, kicked off on 40 campuses across the globe yesterday.

Though much of the rhetoric is familiar, the tactics used to attract attention to Israel's alleged atrocities in Gaza has taken a turn for the shrill and, sometimes, threatening.

In early January at the University of Manitoba, the school's Muslim Students' Association put up a series of posters near a campus bookshop that drew irate complaints. One of them depicted a Jewish fighter plane targeting a baby stroller. Another featured a caricature of a hooked-nosed Hasidic Jew with a star of David, pointing a bazooka at the nose of an Arab carrying a slingshot; a third one showed an Israeli helicopter with a swastika on top, dropping a bomb on a baby bottle.

The school forced their removal the same day.

With outcries from pro-Palestinian groups and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the University of Ottawa has banned the poster that depicted the doomed Gazan boy with the teddy bear, as did its competitor across town, Carleton University.

Dozens of students at New York University were suspended after a rambunctious two-day cafeteria occupation that hoped to draw attention to a host of grievances, including Gaza's humanitarian crisis.

The RCMP is investigating hate crimes after a series of physical altercations last month between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli students in a University of British Columbia dormitory. Jewish students allegedly tore down pro-Hamas posters from a student's door, a couple of fights broke out, and both sides claimed they were victims of racial epithets.

But Toronto's York University is experiencing the most upheaval.

Campus-watchers aren't surprised. In recent years, its various student governments have been almost singularly obsessed with the Middle East and the administration has had a mixed record in trying to quell the anger -- and perhaps feeling bitten, it has taken a laissez-faire attitude.

"York students have always had the inclination to fight the fight," said Mr. Rybak, who blogs on campus life for the Maclean's Web site. "They stay angry much longer than others. It has more of that culture, for better or worse."

Following one of the longest academic strikes in Canadian history, the beleaguered school of 50,000 students now faces another public relations crisis.

Much of the conflict relates to a movement to throw out the executive of the York Federation of Students, the YFS, for supporting the strike, led by the union CUPE.

The impeachment movement, Drop YFS, considers its executive council illegitimate for supporting a CUPE-led teacher's strike against the will of the student body.

A senior YFS official, however, attributes motivations to its Israel policy. CUPE, the YFS and the Ontario chapter of the Canadian Federation of Students have all condemned Israel in stringent terms.

"They brought up this recall as a result of Gaza," Krisna Saravanamuttu, YFS vice-president of equity, said on the Web site of Excalibur, the York newspaper.

On Feb. 11, Drop YFS held a press conference to announce that it had gathered 5,000 signatures necessary to impeach the student executive of the York Federation of Students -- more than twice the number of people who voted in YFS president Hamid Osman, in an election that had a 4% turnout rate, which is extremely low for any university.

The gathering was disrupted by dozens of pro school-government protesters who wanted to enter the small room, and feeling threatened,

the leaders of the opposition fled upstairs to the lounge of Hillel, a Jewish campus group.

Outside, about 100 people waited for them, allegedly baiting and harassing those inside.

Daniel Ferman, the Hillel group's president and also part of Drop YFS, claimed that when he briefly faced the throng, he was referred to as a "dirty Jew" and "f---ing Jew."

The students inside the lounge called for help and were eventually escorted off campus by university security and Toronto police, who are investigating the incident as a possible hate crime.

Another Jewish student involved in Drop YFS reported receiving a phone call during which an unidentified person threatened his life and those of his family members if he did not stop his pro-Israel activities. A potential hate crime is now being investigated by police in the area.

"People just don't feel safe," said Mr. Ferman in an office near the lounge where he and his colleagues took refuge earlier last month. A student at the Schulich School of Business, he stressed that the administration has been too slow to condemn the harassment. "They should make their policies known," he said. "They should take responsibility for what happens on campus."

Shalom Lappin, a former York student who is a linguistics professor at King's College, London, would agree.

A self-described former left-wing protester, Mr. Lappin recalled fierce arguments over Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of the West

Bank when he was at the school in the late 1960s, but they were civil. "Generally speaking, students were not harassed, humiliated and bullied," he said.

Last Wednesday, Mr. Lappin was scheduled for a homecoming of sorts, delivering a talk to the York philosophy department on the computational modelling of grammar induction. Instead, he wrote a letter to the school president, Mamdouh Shoukri, withdrawing from the event in protest of the administration's handling of the alleged attacks on Jewish students.

He said the administration has not shown any teeth. "They are lacking the moral courage in confronting difficult issues," added Mr. Lappin, who is on sabbatical at the University of Toronto this semester. "Why should the politics of a debate that's external to this country poison an entire university?"

Mr. Shoukri said in a press release that every student at York has the right to go about their activities free from intimidation or disruption, but he did not specifically address the allegations under investigation. Frank Cappadocia, the school's director for Student Community and Leadership Development, said the recent events concern him. "I'm disturbed and saddened by them."

This past Thursday, the school announced it was fining and suspending four groups for protesting too loudly on Feb. 12, a series of demonstrations that disrupted classes.

Mr. Cappadocia said the groups Hasbara Fellowship at York, Hillel@ York, Students Against Israeli Apartheid and the Tamil Students' Association broke promises to hold demonstrations that would respect the rights of students in nearby classes. Now all face fines from $250 to $1,000 and potential suspensions from 10 days to a year. The groups, however, will be granted a hearing to plead their case.

Retired York professor Michiel Horn, who recently wrote a commemorative book about the school, observes that contrary to public perception, not everyone at York is a hothead. Instead, he believes that only about 2,000 people -- out of 50,000 -- typically drive this tension. "The rest couldn't give a damn," he said, adding that this geographically remote university is a commuter school. Students come and go. "They probably have other things to worry about."

He also added a bit of wisdom from way back. "A professor from the University of Toronto once offered a good motto on the Middle East: Two wrongs don't make a right, and two rights make nothing but trouble."

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